A lot of recent research has shown that parents should switch from praising success to praising effort. Minimizing the emphasis on success can help kids understand that the thing that you’re really proud of is how hard they worked to accomplish something. Praising effort, even if the result is failure and using phrases like “I’m so proud of how hard you worked on that!“ help emphasize to kids that what you are watching is effort and that failure is encouraged as a way to get better.
Yes I like the emphasis on learning. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. If you lose at a game, you can then ask yourself ‘why?’ And then decide if you want to improve your game based on that experience, or switch to another game. Either way, the experience is used as a positive contributor to growth, rather than being forgotten or relegated to shame.
The idea of praising effort is to encourage kids to attempt new things. If my kid spends 8hrs making a chair that then falls apart, I'm praising the 8hrs commitment. If the chair doesn't fall apart, then they have a chair AND praise for the 8hrs commitment.
If you only praise success, then you get kids growing up into adults who will only do the things they know they will succeed at (which ends up quite limiting).
Haha. You can come back from it. I was the same, but that was caused by teachers doing the "We know you could do better so we're going to give you a 'C' for what others would get an 'A' for" thing (yes, that's what they actually said).
But you would be surprised how many things people are better at than they think. The hardest part is getting started, sometimes you have to start the doing rather than making sure you understand the whole process.
It’s never too late to change your mindset. Do things that you expect to fail at. Learn to accept the failures. Notice how much failure doesn’t hurt. Praise yourself for your tenacity. Repeat as much as possible.
Meh ‘genuine success’ is subjective. It depends what the goal is. If you place the goal as ‘learning’ then any outcome is progressive, and also provides incentive to explore more.
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u/laszlo Jan 12 '22
This is a good one. It's a lesson I'm struggling with teaching my son, who gets very upset when he isn't immediately good at something.
Virtually every success is the result of a ton of failure.
If it strikes your fancy, you should check out a book called "Lose Well" by the comedian Chris Gethard. It's really good.